The guard shoved him onto a chair, and with a nod from the lanky man was dismissed. For a minute no one said anything. Against every message sent by the insistent aching in his head and the violent pain in his side Webster tried to breathe regularly, as deeply as he could, and to establish some sense of calm.
“Why are you in Morocco?” The thin man spoke. His accent was heavy but unplaceable, his voice languid, almost quiet, and while waiting for the answer he cocked his head on one side, staring at a point on the desk.
“I’m here on business.”
There was a long pause. The thin man stared at his finger as it made an endless figure-of-eight over the wood. He hadn’t yet looked Webster in the eye.
“What business?”
The best lie was as close as you could make it to the truth. “Research.”
“Of what?”
“A businessman. In Marrakech.”
“Name?”
“My name?”
“His name. You are Webster.”
How did they know it? His passport was at his hotel, carefully hidden. He had no credit cards on him. They had his phone, but his phone was locked. Unless they had found Driss as well. That unpleasant thought had not struck him before.
“I can’t tell you that.”
The thin man’s finger stopped circling. Out of the corner of his eye Webster sensed movement and turned stiffly, too slowly to see the flat of the other man’s hand connect with the side of his head with improbable force. A rush of air broke into his ear with the noise of a thunderclap and he fell from the chair onto the floor.
He lay there for a moment, his cheek pressing into grit, dazed and shocked, the only stubborn thought in his head that he must be close to something devastating to be receiving this sort of treatment.
The man in sunglasses stood over him, his face silhouetted against the bluish fluorescent light.
“Up.”
The word was hoarse, sudden; Webster felt the need to obey it, but could not. He lay still for a moment, processing the shock, before lifting his head off the floor, feeling the muscles in his neck straining with the work. This time he saw the man move. In one swift motion he drew his foot back and with great precision kicked Webster hard in the side, in the soft flesh between hip and ribs, filling his body with a great, vivid pain that seemed to swirl with color and brought nausea surging into his throat.
Webster rolled onto his side, curling up to protect himself, for the first time feeling real fear inside the pain. This man knew what he was doing. He had the discipline of the professional, the economy of effort, the singular focus. He had done this many times before. Shadow fell across Webster and he knew that the man was standing over him, calculating which piece of him to work on next.
But instead he took a step closer, bent down until his mouth was an inch from Webster’s ear, and when he spoke his voice was a harsh, quiet rasp that Webster had to strain to hear through the ringing and the roar.
“Tell me why you are here.”
Webster tried to speak, but had no words. The taste of acid was on his tongue and his mouth was clamped shut. It wouldn’t open; his body was no longer taking commands.
“Up.” The voice was still quiet, but it had power; Webster felt it occupy him. He made a weak effort to sit.
The man said something in his own language, and at his command his colleague came out from behind the desk, put a hand under Webster’s arm and together they pulled him up, dumping him heavily onto the chair, where he sat slumped, conscious only of the pain and his own dead weight.
Again the voice in his ear, fierce but strangely delicate, and so close he could feel its breath. “Tell me who you are.”
With effort he managed to shake his head. There was a pause, during which he sensed the man moving slowly away from him.
This time he was ready for it, almost, and managed through some instinct to bring his hand up to his head as the blow struck, the same as the first, an open palm aimed at his head. It was enough to send him over, but he grabbed the edge of the desk and righted himself, turning back with a defiant look at his attacker.
“The night will be long if you do not help us,” said the thin man.
But the professional had finished talking. He put his arm around Webster’s neck and pulled sharply, sending the chair crashing backward. Webster felt his skull crack on the floor and looked up, stunned, to see the man pulling him upright again. He said something else to his underling, who took Webster, spun him around and held him tightly across his middle, clamping his arms and causing pain to rage through his side. Webster writhed against the grip but his strength had gone, and all he could do was push the man backward and try to unbalance him. They slammed into a wall, but his hold was still firm and Webster for a moment stopped struggling because the pain was too much, and at that moment he saw the smaller man bring his knee up with great force and precision into the middle of his thigh, once, twice and quickly again.
Everything stopped. Every thought, every sense. There was only the pain, sharp and raging, which began in his gut and spread out through his body until there was nothing else.
Webster reeled with the shock. The tall man let go of him and he retched, felt acid rise into his mouth. He hadn’t been prepared. He hadn’t thought it possible that so much pain could come at once. The tall man pushed him, just enough to send him back a pace, and he fell back onto the chair.
His torturer stood still for a moment, staring at Webster through the dark lenses of his glasses, giving him a simple message: if you persist, so will I, and in the end I will destroy you. After several seconds he clenched and released his fists once more, and stepped forward, stooping until their eyes were level.
“Pressure points. In your leg. I do it again, you pass out.”
The pain was everywhere, but it had settled, become constant.
“After, I start with your eyes.”
Webster felt any courage he had quail inside him, and blinked involuntarily.
“Are you Chiba?” he said, his lips numb, trying his best to look the man in the face.
The man stared at him, his gaze steady and black.
“If my friends don’t hear from me twice a day,” said Webster, hearing the words drop clumsily from his mouth as if someone else was saying them, “everything we know about your business with Qazai goes to the press.”
The man looked up and smiled at his friend before turning back to Webster.
“Who is Qazai?”
“You know who he is.”
At that, he took Webster’s jaw in his hand and gripped it hard with strong fingers, holding it for a moment before he spoke. Webster could feel the flesh of his cheek being crushed against his teeth.
“You know nothing.”
With two fingers of his other hand he closed Webster’s eyelids, and pushed hard into the sockets.
“Nothing,” he said, with a final stab, and left.
18.
WEBSTER PULLED HIMSELF SLOWLY to the wall and sat against it, his legs straight on the floor. Beyond the end of his robe his brown leather shoes stuck out, and he wondered vaguely whether it was they that had earlier betrayed his disguise. Something about their familiarity, their solid sense of the everyday, made him feel truly hopeless for the first time. Two men had died before him, and his mind was empty of any thought that might prevent him from becoming the third.
The relentless light was worse than the darkness that had come before because it left no space for evasion. This was real, it was happening now, and it would not end well.
He felt for his watch under the heavy brown sleeve. Two o’clock. An overwhelming tiredness took hold of him, but he knew that he could not sleep; not here, not while that man was somewhere close beyond that door. Fear, not resolution, kept him awake. Who was this man? Who had taught him? For he was no mere thug. He had learned his
craft from others. It was a technique, and he was a technician.
Very probably he was even now preparing for more. What he had just done might only be a prelude to the real work, and for a terrified moment Webster let himself imagine what that might be; saw a bag full of rusting tools, and the torturer in his sunglasses calmly taking his pick. But there was a meager thread of comfort in that thought, because if they wanted information from him, they didn’t yet want to kill him. The only moment of hope in his interrogation had been when he mentioned the name Chiba. That had registered; he knew it had. Why else tell him that he knew nothing?
Webster closed his eyes, fought the pain and tried to think. They were right: he seemed to know less now than before. The question that had brought him to Marrakech was no closer to being answered. He had met them, but he still had no idea who was persecuting Darius Qazai.
Instead, he tried to turn it around. Who did these people think he was, and what did they want from him? At some point they had spotted him in the city, and had followed him. He had been knocked down, and they had brought him here. But it was a stretch to think that they had merely taken advantage of an opportunity: they must have planned the accident. And in that case, he realized, with something like shame at his stupidity, it was entirely likely that they had known he was in Marrakech before he had started following Qazai. They had known he was coming and had made arrangements for him. That was how they knew his name.
With clarity more blinding than the light around him Webster all at once understood. They thought he was Qazai’s man—his detective, his spy, his security person. If they had been monitoring Qazai’s movements over the last month, or his phone, or his bank accounts, they would have seen Webster working, apparently doing his client’s bidding. And why else would he have come to Marrakech—a day ahead, no less, to make his preparations—if not to make sure that Qazai was safe here, and to conspire against his enemies?
Safe in London, he might have laughed at the irony of it. Mehr had died, Timur had died, and now he would die as a Qazai loyalist, all to convince his master to pay up what he owed or honor his contract or return whatever wasn’t his. Such was his bloody-mindedness that even now he resented meeting his end on Qazai business, bound for all eternity to his interests and never fully understanding how.
Surely that wasn’t necessary. There had to be a way. Qazai’s enemy may not be his friend, but if they knew, at least, that no purpose would be served by killing him—that Qazai might laugh sooner than mourn—perhaps they would think twice about making the effort. If effort it was.
Webster shook his head, scolded himself for being fanciful. He was alive because they wanted to know what he knew, that was all, and his only real hope was to offer, but not deliver, something that was valuable to them, something whose value was not yet apparent. That would be his slender strategy: explain his relationship with Qazai, try to find out what they wanted and think of something—create something if necessary—that he could offer them that required him to be freed from this room. It wasn’t much, but briefly he felt better. He had a purpose, a feeble claim on hope.
Having addressed how he might survive, though, his thoughts turned to what would happen if he didn’t. Webster was not a cowardly man. The notion of death didn’t scare him. If there was meaning to it—if some part of him lived on beyond it—he retained just enough of his religious schooling to trust that the process would be benign; and if there was no meaning he wouldn’t be around to miss it. No, the passing from one state to another didn’t trouble him, but he found it hard to imagine an afterlife that wasn’t consumed by a raging grief at what you had been forced to leave behind. At one with not existing he might be, but never again to watch his children sleep, or talk with Elsa in bed, or take their boat out to the mouth of the estuary in the rain—take those things away and he wasn’t sure, in fact, how much of him would in any case remain.
But this, too, was indulgent. With a black laugh, thick with phlegm and blood, he acknowledged the only truth he could depend on, sobering and shaming: that despite these passions, for all that he might love his family and strive to be good, he had for months been inviting a living death, courting with a kind of grim glee an existence where everything he held dear might reject him without any help from Qazai or his enemies.
He tried the door, which was indeed locked. A single window the size of a shoebox showed through its four bars that it was still dark outside. For a minute or two he wondered how he might escape: find a way to get someone to open the door, overpower them, run. But previous experience showed that no one would answer his calls, and in any case he wouldn’t be running anywhere. He could barely stand.
An hour passed. No noise reached him; the silence was as total as the light was unyielding. He had had no water for over eight hours, and even though it was now nighttime the room had lost none of its heat. Through a slow process of squirming and pulling he managed to bring the robe up to his waist and, after much pain, over his head. His shirt was dark all over with sweat, his mouth so dry it took effort to force his lips apart. He lay down on the floor, watched a beetle clicking along the far wall, and with the robe folded under his head tried to sleep; but every time he closed his eyes a jerking montage of the day’s events played across them and wouldn’t let him rest.
• • •
AT FOUR, OR JUST BEFORE, a key turned in the lock and the door opened. As Webster sat up the first thing he saw was a large bottle of mineral water being held by the cap in someone’s hand; the second, as his eyes rose, was Senechal, perfectly pressed in a fresh suit, his skin translucent under the fluorescent bulb. As if from another world he looked down at Webster, closed the door behind him, sniffed in distaste, moved around to the far side of the desk and began to wipe the chair with a handkerchief that he pulled from his top pocket. Grudgingly satisfied, he sat. The door locked behind him.
“Asseyez-vous.”
It was the same thin rasp of a voice, but it was no longer ingratiating, no longer sly. Webster looked at him warily from the floor, trying to calculate why he was here and what in heaven’s name it meant. All he knew was that the aversion he had once felt to him had become the most intense and disarming loathing, and if it hadn’t been for the promise of water he would have stayed where he was. In that moment, his imagination wild, Webster saw Senechal as an administrator of death, a man whose talent was to bury things—problems, money, color, life—and who had now come to bury him. Somehow he knew it.
Using the wall to steady himself he stood, moved to the desk and took the bottle, uncapping it and bringing it up to his mouth in a single motion. As he drank, feeling the water cooling his throat, he kept his eyes on Senechal, who stared right back at him.
“Sit,” he said, when Webster was done, and watched him coldly as he sank, clutching the bottle, onto the chair. “You, Mr. Webster, are the most difficult consultant I have ever met. We all know that consultants do not do what you pay them to do, but you? With you it is ridiculous.”
Webster didn’t reply.
“We ask you to do a simple thing, but you are not a simple person and you will not do it. Well. Now you are in Marrakech, and it is not such a simple thing to leave.”
Webster looked at him openmouthed; his side sang with pain. He shook his head in confusion and disbelief.
“So you’re working for them.”
Senechal adjusted himself on his chair so that he was upright and correct, and smiled a tight little smile.
“Truly you are the great detective. You have understood it all.” He shook his head briskly. “No, Mr. Webster. I see you have no idea what is going on. Let me explain a little to you. You have put yourself in the way of an important transaction. Now, I am happy to say, the transaction can go ahead without you. This means that you are no longer necessary for what we want to do.”
Webster closed his eyes tight, wishing Senechal away. But he went on.
“The
men you met earlier are efficient people. They do not waste energy.”
“I’d noticed.”
“Confidentially, they do not see a reason to keep you alive. They say you threatened them, and that has not impressed them.” He paused. “But I am efficient too, and it may be that it is less effort to keep you alive. I do not mind. To decide, I have to discover what is in your head. I have to tell them what you know. What you have to bargain with, in short.” He smiled again. “I suspect it is not very much, in which case this will be the last room you see.”
In the harsh light Senechal’s face was inhuman; more than ever he looked like a clay figure granted some weak and temporary sort of life. Webster considered for a moment what might be gained from pushing the table over onto him, from knocking him off his chair, from taking his head and beating it against the wall.
“When London wakes up,” he said, “my report will be going to the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the twenty largest investors in Tabriz. What did your master say? If he is your master. All he has is his reputation. In about five hours he won’t be selling anything.”
Senechal considered Webster for a moment, scanning his bloodied face for signs of a bluff.
“The thing is, Mr. Webster, you know nothing that could hurt Mr. Qazai.”
“I know I’m here. Eventually others will know I was.”
“You are in a police station. You caused an accident in the medina and the police brought you here. You had no papers and were dressed, ridiculously, as a local. They suspected you of planning some sort of atrocity. I came—for the second time—to see that you were freed and received proper medical treatment.” He paused. “Unfortunately I was too late. Being here means nothing.”
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